Introduction:

The concept of this field trip is for us to appreciate the difference in phenotype due to different geographical conditions and environmental factors such as; sunlight, humidity, temperature or soil nutrition not really, its to see if you can discern the underlying processes. Samples will be taken randomly by sampling 3 separate areas for snails vague.


Our sampling regime will be as follows. We will select 2 grassland areas, one with an acidic stream running though it, one without. Also we will select one shrub area. This allows us to get a broad spread of samples based on the environment in which the snail was living in why. On these 3 sites we will select 40 samples of snails? from each, for a total of 120 samples across the three sites. We then compare the samples recorded. The environmental conditions (Approximate light levels, presence of water, approximate wind speed) at the 3 sampling points will be recorded so as to maintain a record of what conditions the snails were living in.


Difference in the environmental factors can be identified and the hypothesis can be tested how, how will you know its not drift... or not selection if the environments are different is some ways. Our hypothesis is that the two sites have the same frequencies of phenotypes due to the relative similarities between the 3 sites. If we make an observation that snail phenotypes do not differ among the different habitats surveyed, our null hypothesis will be supported. Alternatively, if the snail phenotypes change significantly in the different habitats, our alternative hypothesis will be considered. Our alternative hypothesis is that differences in the snail phenotypes could be caused by genetic drift and not by environmental factors. This would be indicated by the presence of snails with multiple bands existing outside of the expected areas.


The difference in phenotypes between the snails could be due to a mutation implemented mutation is though to be random with respect to need by the environment and then evolution acting on it. Another possibility could be genetic drift. Genetic drift is a process in which chance process cause fluctuation in allele frequency from one generation to the next, common in small populations. We hope to learn how snail phenotypes can differ over a range of habitats, and what types of differences might be a result of various evolutionary processes. This experiment will seek to find if the differences in the snail phenotypes collected be due to genetic drift, natural selection, the founder effect, or possibly other processes how will you tell these apart.


We will be studying snails because they have less complex phenotypic expression really who says that, or on what evidence do you say that that is controlled by few alleles, however it is more complex in case of humans, for example eye colour or skin colour really, isn't the evidence that only a few loci affect these characters. Snails are both more available and easier to use than humans, and can have great phenotypic diversity even in a small sample area. Another advantage of snails is their generation time compared to humans is very small allowing for comparisons between generations to be made much more quickly than in studies with humans how are you going to compare between generations. This gives us a much better opportunity to study how evolution takes place and affects phenotypes.


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Lalit Mishra, Joseph Southan, Richard Dittmer, Rahan Ahmed and Yahya Ahmed.